The Acl Club

``you Have The Shea Ralph Injury,'' The Doctor Said. I'd Soon Discover Why A Knee Problem In A Man With A Few Miles On The Odometer Is Epidemic Among Young Women Athletes.

January 21, 2001|By MIKE SWIFT

Even now, in the twilight of my 30s, playing a game I never played well, the basketball gods occasionally grant even this humble supplicant a moment of perfect athletic grace. One afternoon last February at the Y, I was about to have just such a moment. As I sprinted toward the basket on a fastbreak, a teammate's pass spun through the air on an ideal trajectory to meet me.

I caught the ball over my shoulder and went up for a layup. Unfortunately, a younger, quicker defender had caught me. He fouled me, but I warded him off and the ball went through the rim. I landed with my left knee locked, only to hear something akin to the popping of a paper bag filled with air or the snapping of a large rubber band -- a sound so weirdly powerful that I couldn't believe it was coming from inside my body.

``Man, was that your knee?'' asked a guy watching the game from the side of the court, 20 feet away.

Yeah, it was.

I had felt the bones separate inside the joint in a way they never had before. But I wasn't screaming in agony or anything. I could walk. It felt more like a sprain than anything else. Couldn't be that bad, I told myself, or I wouldn't be walking.

Still, even after the swelling subsided, my knee didn't feel right. Just to confirm it wasn't something really bad, I finally went to a Hartford orthopedist, Dr. Steven F. Schutzer. Schutzer manipulated my knee as he had me relax the muscles around the joint, moving the calf-bone against the thighbone as if he were probing the links in a chain. Then he soberly pronounced my diagnosis.

``You have the Shea Ralph injury,'' he said.

Thanks to the cruelest ligament, I haven't played basketball since.

What Schutzer was telling me was that like current and former UConn basketball players Shea Ralph, Rebecca Lobo, Sue Bird, Marci Czel, Tihana Abrlic and future recruit Ashley Valley, I had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in my knee. A ruptured ACL had rendered my left knee oddly unstable, feeling as if it might give way or buckle even during simple motions like pivoting in the kitchen to take a dish from the counter to the sink.

Now I had to make a choice: Was my athletic career, such as it was, over at the age of 38? Or would I undergo a surgery that would take a year for full recovery but that would allow me to extend my basketball, my more strenuous backpacking and climbing and my other sports into middle age? It was a watershed decision. How would I feel if I looked back 10 years from now and regretted what I did or did not do?

Besides shock, something stuck with me about my diagnosis. My doctor hadn't called it ``the Jerry Rice injury,'' ``the Terrell Davis injury'' or ``the Tim Hardaway injury,'' to name a few well-known male professional athletes who have torn an ACL.

That a male doctor speaking to a male patient would diagnose an ACL rupture as ``the Shea Ralph injury'' shows how our culture, at least in Connecticut, is starting to change in its relationship to our games -- who plays, who gets injured, and our expectations for recovery from those injuries.

I had entered what Rebecca Lobo, tongue in cheek, calls ``the wonderful world of the ACL.'' It certainly is not an exclusively female world. At least as many men as women injure an ACL each year. But ACL injuries provide one striking measure of how sports in America are becoming more egalitarian. As millions of girls and women have jumped into athletics since Title IX opened doors to female athletes in 1972, and as older adults of both sexes seek to extend their athletic lives, knee injuries have mushroomed.

Ralph once dubbed it ``the mother of all injuries in basketball.'' Depending on who is doing the estimating, there are between 80,000 and 250,000 ACL injuries in the United States each year. Predictions for the number of ACL surgeries in coming years run as high as 175,000 annual surgeries -- a cost of $3 billion for surgery and rehabilitation. Tamika Catchings, Tennessee's All-America senior and last year's national collegiate player of the year, last week became the latest big-name woman basketball player to tear an ACL.

A decade ago, a non-elite woman athlete with a torn ACL might have been asked by her doctor: Is it really that important to you that you keep playing sports?

Joyce says women who come to him now with torn ACLs ``are every bit as fiercely competitive as every male patient that I have. They want the best and they want it right now and they have every expectation of returning to the level they were at.''

The surgeon sees the same doggedness to stay in the game among his older patients.

``Ten years ago, you wouldn't have thought of doing this for people over the age of 40. But I've done this for a guy of 60,'' Joyce said.

It wasn't much of a stretch for me to see that if so many women weren't demanding to come back, I might not have had that opportunity either.